Realme's new line of cheap phones takes on Moto G with big batteries and 5G

The UK's cheap phone market is incredibly competitive, with devices from Redmi, Motorola, Nokia, Poco and recently Realme and Vivo duking it out - and another big change is coming with Realme launching a new line of low-cost devices.

If you don't know Realme - and haven't read our useful guide on them - the company has a few series of smartphones, but doesn't sell them all in the UK. Well, it's now introducing another family, called Narzo, with the Realme Narzo 30 devices the first phones on sale.

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Narzo handsets undercut their main-series siblings by a small amount, and drop the specs fittingly, though like Motorola's phones they often have a specific selling point. For example the two new phones, the Narzo 30A and 30 5G, have a big selling point each - that is, a huge battery and 5G connectivity respectively.

With the cheap phone market being so busy, only time will tell how popular the new Realme Narzo devices become. We'll list the specs below so you can see how they compare.

Realme Narzo 30 phones

The two new Realme Narzo phones, the Narzo 30A and Narzo 30 5G, respectively cost £129 and...  $219. We don't actually have a pound sterling price for the latter, as it's being sold exclusively through online retailer AliExpress which prices everything in US dollars, but that amounts to around £155.

The Realme Narzo 30A has a 6.5-inch 720 x 1600 screen. It has a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, a Helio G85 chipset, a 13MP main camera, an 8MP selfie camera, a USB-C port and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The real selling point of the 30A is its massive 6,000mAh battery, which could offer two days of use, and rivals Moto's biggest-battery phones in this regard.

The Realme Narzo 30 5G also has a 6.5-inch screen, but with a higher resolution and a 90Hz refresh rate. Its main camera is 48MP and the front one is 16MP, with the phone offering a few more photography modes than the 30A. The phone uses the Dimensity 700 chipset with, as the name suggests, a 5G modem.

You're getting a big battery here too, with a 5,000mAh power pack, though it won't last as long as the 30A's because 5G can consume lots of power.

Realme's announcement of the Narzo phones coming to the UK is worded vaguely, which implies more Narzo 30 phones could come too, but at the moment we only know about these two.

We haven't tested either of these new Realme Narzo phones, so can't quite recommend them yet, but when we do review them they'll need to perform well to keep afloat with all the rivals we named above.

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